Documentation. Hardly anybody wants to write it, but it is one of the most important deliverables in a software project. Without documentation, it becomes very difficult to understand why things were done the way they were and if the project is operating as expected.

Something we typically have to learn on our own is how to (1) auto-generate an ADF form and project from an Oracle BPM project and (2) how to reuse the ADF project when subsequently generating more ADF forms.

Others may disagree, but I am a fan of creating the first cut of ADF forms for Oracle BPM using the human task's auto-generation feature. While this worked well in previous releases, in 12.2.1.1, 12.2.1.2 and 12.2.1.3 small manual edits are now needed to eliminate the errors on the generated form.

There are now two types of errors caused by 12.2.1.x auto-generation - edAttTy errors and duplicate ID errors.

Patches

While this blog describes the manual edits you can make to the auto-generated .jspx files to correct the issues:

The purpose of this post is to document, step-by-step, how to create cascading dropdowns in an ADF form's user interface when ADFbc is used. A cascading dropdown frequently occurs in forms and occurs when a selection made in one field's dropdown automatically and dynamically changes the list of valid values in another field's dropdown. This topic uses address fields for this example. After selecting a country from the country field's dropdown list, the state field's list of valid states or provinces is changed to show the list of states / provinces for the country selected.

AVIO has created the Capital Expenditure Request process accelerator in order to assist organizations using PeopleSoft to have a more comprehensive capability around budgeting and tracking of capital expenditures. The CER process enables organizations to have better visibility into the financial health of their projects, ensured compliance with business policies, and allowed real time comparison between PeopleSoft actuals and the approved CER amounts.

For the most part, every project has tasks related to code quality and software metrics. This process is usually hard to understand, tedious, and subjective to what the person reviewing the code believes is quality code. The project may compile and run as required, but developers will always ask “did we do it right?”.

I've been developing ADF projects at client sites for over 4 years now (wow, that went fast!). The purpose of this blog is to point out the first things I do on every project to make it run smoothly. Two of these are JDeveloper configurations, but I sometimes miss them after I've installed a new version of JDeveloper or have a new laptop to work with. The other are project level setups to customize projects specifically. These recommendations are based on the 12c version of ADF, however these are applicable to 11g (although the instructions may vary).

Single-page apps are one of those things that is in-vogue, but has been technically-possible for a while now. I have created single-page web apps with ADF, Sharepoint, and using standard web technologies. One thing to keep in mind, and one that has caused me some pain, is what you will do if and when the business asks for another page to be added outside of the single-page design. Hopefully, I am guessing you don't have to use Sharepoint as it's not all that hard to accomodate additions like this in ADF.

Once we identify a pattern and are certain it's going to happen again, our code reuse mentality breaks loose. It's only a matter of time until we end up with a shiny new tool in our code toolbox. This is especially true when we know that plugging in an existing piece of code can save us significant time and effort the next time around.

AVIO specializes in assisting our clients in achieving their strategic goals as soon as possible. What tomorrow looks like has never been so uncertain and that is why AVIO Consulting has built our firm around quickly understanding and delivering our client's critical projects.